the skies above and below
by The Lady Avaritia
Summary: It is those acts of God which leave us puzzled the most, but some people are too good for this world anyway. There is something tragic and life-altering, and it leaves a bitter acrid taste in his mouth when he thinks about how there should have been some point to this, some crucial life lesson to be learned, but there really isn't any. Modern AU.


There is something so cliché about a rich older man falling in love with a catholic schoolboy. There is something tragic and life-altering, and it leaves a bitter acrid taste in his mouth when he thinks about how there should have been some point to this, some crucial life lesson to be learned, but there really isn't any.

He starts praying. Every night, hands clasped dutifully, and eyes turned to the ceiling, to the unreachable sky he prays. Prays for peace of mind, and calm and many things that he never thought he would need.

~x~

He does not believe in anything but the Green God – the god of the dollars, the only one who's ever bestowed his blessings upon him. He owns a chateau in Southern France, a country house, and a city penthouse where he sleeps after work. He drives a Porsche, even though he has three other cars, each more expensive than the other, and he is maybe a little obsessed with possessing the newest technologies available, be it cellphones, laptops or television sets. He is a self-made man, and takes his pride in that, he has achieved everything with his own two hands. He feels entitled to the arrogant disposition that comes with money and success because he has earned it.

~x~

Hidan is a pale pretty thing, a little like an icon, and there is something angelic in the chiseled lines of his face. He is devout, believes zealously, can recite choice passages from the bible by heart, sings in the choir, dreams to be a priest one day. He cusses like a sailor from the lowest of the low, and there is something in the dichotomy between the soft voice that prays and the strident sharp sentences of command and anger, punctured at even intervals with choice variations of "fuck" and "shit". If he likes you a lot, he might even call you "bitch" and clasp a hand on your shoulder.

~x~

Kakuzu does not like donating money. He does it anyway, for publicity whatever. He donates to things he believes in – schools and children hospitals, only certified charities, he goes and checks them out himself, and this is how that one August afternoon finds him in the school parking lot. The soft hum of the car engine dies out, and he steps out, and pulls his sunglasses. He tours the school, speaks to teachers and students, adopting the polite detached manner that he'd learned ages ago was best. He accepted the invitation to hear the school choir, more out of idle curiosity than anything. He was going to donate some sum, at least for the auditorium, he decided. If the singing was good.

~x~

Hidan curses under his breath. He forgot today that fucking businessman was coming, and the choir was supposed to perform. Everyone else was dressed neatly all in black and suits and bow-ties and what-fucking-not, except for him. Welp. They'd have to fucking deal with it, because he was the best they had.

~x~

"The solo," Kakuzu hisses urgently at the administrator beside him, "Who sings the solo?"

The boy is lean and tall, and stands out sharply in his jeans and t-shirt, and pale skin and hair.

"That's Hidan," the woman sounds like she's speaking the name of an angel as she says it, "He is the best student we have. We all have high hopes for him."

He senses a "but" and cuts her off with a dismissive wave. He doesn't want to know. The boy looks like an icon.

~x~

There's something cliché about a catholic schoolboy having an affair with a rich older man, but Hidan is about a month and a half from turning eighteen, and it could be much worse. He disagrees with Kakuzu on a lot of subjects. Religion. Politics. Business. The list goes on and on.

He doesn't skirt around them either. So they are prone to loud yelling matches, and angry debates that always seem to end up between Kakuzu's black silk sheets, with a moot point. There's something tragic in the bruises that grace Hidan's hips and neck. There's poetry in the arch of his lids over his eyes as he closes them and his soft full lips move to form the words of a silent prayer.

~x~

Kakuzu gets him a Bible for Christmas – an ancient copy in Latin, thick leather bound, with golden incrustations on the cover. He got it renovated, the colors of the pictures – refreshed. It's the most money he's ever spent on a present. Hidan nearly cries when he sees it.

"I… didn't get you anything," he says softly, looks away, "I mean, you have everything already and such…"

"Read it to me," Kakuzu says, "I've never read the Bible. Read to me."

Hidan obeys. His Latin is good, as expected of the president of the Latin Language League. His voice is soft, and worshipful. Kakuzu wonders what is it like to experience true faith as his hand threads lightly though silvery strands of hair.

~x~

Hidan starts complaining of headaches the August before his first year in college. He is already eighteen, so their relationship is not strictly illicit anymore. But if the media hounds got wind of it… they keep quiet, for Kakuzu's sake.

~x~

Some days he is too tired to get out of bed, and seems unable to walk straight, bumping into furniture and walls, and Kakuzu is afraid to leave him alone in the apartment. On these days he calls off meetings and conferences, and stays with him. Hidan is curled in a ball in complete darkness moaning and cursing. The pills some inept neurologist prescribed him are barely keeping the killer migraines at bay.

Kakuzu drags him to the best private hospitals, calls in his own doctors.

"It's a migraine, nothing can be done, there is no certain cause."

"Sleep more." "Eat more." "Sleep less." "Eat less." "Drink a lot of water." "Don't hydrate too much." "Drink coffee." "Don't drink coffee." "Your blood sugar is too low." "You should eat less sugar." "It's psychological." "Too much stress." "Avoide stress." "Homeopathic medicine." "Prescription painkillers this-and-that-odin."

~x~

By September Hidan functions solely on not-strictly-legally obtained prescription painkillers. He can't sleep from the pain. He is nauseous most of the time. He barely keeps any food down.

The MRI comes clean. Kakuzu breathes a sigh of relief and Hidan thanks God.

~x~

By November he can't get out of bed. Sudden bouts of photosensitivity, and strikes of migraine that send him crashing to the ground with the bright flashes of white pain keep him down. The painkillers don't help. He gets sick with the flu, and the fever renders him complete helpless. He moans and trashes and murmurs incoherent things, half-prayers, half-curses and in-betweens. The vomiting costs him i pounds that he couldn't have afforded to lose in the first place. Kakuzu loathes the idea of hiring a nurse, so he stays at home and works from his laptop and yells at employees over the phone.

~x~

"It feels like something is pressing at my skull from the inside," Hidan moans softly against his chest. His eyes are shut tight. He doesn't have the energy to cover his speech with colorful curse words anymore. He still prays a lot, and touches the Bible Kakuzu had given him, running his hands over the pages, but he doesn't read – it hurts his eyes too much. (a doctor had suggested he might be in need of glasses, so they had gone to a specialist, but no everything was fine with his eyes).

"I know, I know…"

~x~

He gets better around December, more lively and energetic. He wants to do things. He is so thin it's almost painful to look at. They have Christmas dinner together.

"I bet you're wondering why there are no parents in the whole picture," he says later that night, pressed against Kakuzu's warm side.

"I figured you'd tell me when you wanted to."

"I do have them. They run a hot springs hotel, small business in a small city, really nice and all that. And I love them, seriously. We keep in touch by phone and email, but when I got the scholarship here, all the way across the country, well, they couldn't just, you know, leave everything. So they signed a declaration that I can live alone, and they transfer money to my account every month, and they used to pay the rent for my apartment before I moved in with you. But you know, they don't know I have a boyfriend. Or that I … would ever have a _boy_friend."

"Oh."

"It's all cool, though. I called them the other day. I'll call them tomorrow. I told them I'm sick, and they're worried, but not enough to come here."

Kakuzu hums, because he figures that Hidan's words don't really warrant a response.

~x~

January, and Kakuzu insists on a second MRI, after Hidan passes out in new Year's Eve.

"But like," says Hidan, "This thing is fucking HUGE! How could they have missed it, when it's practically taken about a quarter of my brain!"

Kakuzu wants to run the previous hospital into the ground, sue them for criminal negligence, because a tumor does not, or should not get this large in a few months.

"They said there was NOTHING," he rages, "They said you were FINE!" he is shaking with barely controlled fury.

"It's terminal, it wouldn't have mattered either way."

"Bullshit. I could have bought you more time!"

"You can't buy me everything, Kakuzu. God does what God sees fit."

"Well… then God is a fucking piece of shit bastard."

Hidan sighs and his shoulders sag, and there is nothing he can say to that, or maybe he doesn't have the strength to defend his God anymore, and Kakuzu isn't sure why that scares him so much.

~x~

They make it sound romantically tragic, the slow death of a lover, all those writers and piece-of-shit wannabe movie makers. They twist the tragedies of life and call it art, but there's nothing brutal and honest about the movies called brutal and honest, and nothing poetically beautiful and sad about the novels called poetically beautiful and sad.

Reading articles the dissect in vivid graphic detail exactly how the death will take place doesn't help either. They lay out the cold hard facts like at an autopsy table. They don't tell you how to deal with it.

It takes Kakuzu a while to realize that there is no manual for that. That no deep profound understanding will come to him if he looks hard enough. It starts out ugly, it's going to end ugly.

~x~

The doctors who said bullshit and spewed condolences like Hidan was dead already did not tell him how to deal with the violent mood-swings, with the pain-induced hallucinations, with the painful moments of stark-clear lucidity that seemed even harder to bear than anything else, with all the vomiting, and hacking out blood, with the putrid smell of death in a dark room… No one ever told him that it would hurt so much to see the one who loves him most slowly deteriorate and become something else entirely.

~x~

He wants to end it all with some pointless gesture of grandeur – a trip to the Vatican on the private jet or something equally brilliant and ridiculous, but this is not a movie – Hidan is too weak to even pray, let alone fly on a plane.

~x~

His parents come for the funeral, and Kakuzu introduces himself as a friend, and the pain of that adds another cut to the battered bruised mess that is his heart already. There's a lot of people Hidan knew, and they all come dressed in black and say meaningless empty things about the goodness of his soul, and his beautiful personality. It occurs to Kakuzu that they have no fucking idea, no fucking idea, how that personality had decayed, how the warm heart and the beautiful brain and all those other things they praised had practically rotten and melted off from medicine and sickness, and –

They couldn't know. No use being angry. It was no their fault.

~x~

He takes the private jet to Rome after all, wanders aimlessly, looks at churches, wanders the halls of the Pope's museum, buys souvenirs – little rosaries and tiny venetian mosaics of the Madonna, and replicas of Michelangelo's paintings, and whatnot. He eats ice-cream and drinks Italian wine and spends his evenings in half-empty taverns in questionable parts of the city.

He leaves, eventually, when the emails in his inbox number about four thousand, no exaggeration, and there are three hundred missed calls on his phone and he can't ignore the world anymore. He is dissatisfied and unhappy. He had hopes for peace of mind. Had hoped that by coming here, he would finally receive some modicum of understanding of the grand scheme of things, some sign from the God that Hidan so fervently prayed to, but he gets nothing, nothing but the blank, devoid of meaning prettiness of some Renaissance genius' self-fulfilling murals and sculptures of angels. So he returns to his world and to his own god, that blessed green scaly monster that had owned his heart before.

~x~

"I see you've decided to return to the world of the living," Pein remarks without reproach, raising his head from the papers on his desk. He is younger than Kakuzu, a brilliant businessman, a good CEO.

"And I see you've managed to lose most of my money," Kakuzu says, but he is too tired to sound cross. He still has enough to live out the rest of his life in mind-numbing luxury without having to raise a finger to work, but it's the very fact that's he lost, which irks him.

Pein shrugs.

"You went under for almost two years."

"Bullshit," Kakuzu says, "I worked from home."

"For a year. Fine. But then you disappeared, and look," he raised a hand, "I don't care what personal issue happened. I hope it's resolved now. But if this company is to survive, we need you here."

"Yeah," says Kakuzu, "yeah, it's resolved."

~x~

There is something so cliché about a rich older man falling in love with a catholic schoolboy. There is something tragic and life-altering, and it leaves a bitter acrid taste in his mouth when he thinks about how there should have been some point to this, some crucial life lesson to be learned, but there really isn't any.

He starts praying. Every night, hands clasped dutifully, and eyes turned to the ceiling, to the unreachable sky he prays. Prays for peace of mind, and calm and many things that he never thought he would need.

~x~

"I prayed to you. Every night. I prayed to you."

"I know. I heard."


End file.
